Taking high quality photographs in lower ambient light, or photographing dynamic scenes (e.g., sport scenes) can be challenging due to camera and/or scene object motion during an image's exposure time. The general class of techniques directed to reducing the blur associated with camera motion may be referred to as “image stabilization.” In practice, image stabilization's primary goal is to reduce camera shake caused by the photographer's inability to stop their hand motion during image capture. Image stabilization may be used in binoculars, still and video cameras and astronomical telescopes. In still cameras, camera shake can be particularly problematic at slow shutter speeds or with long focal length (telephoto) lenses. With video cameras, camera shake can cause visible frame-to-frame jitter in the recorded video. In astronomical settings, the problem of lens-shake can be added to by variations in the atmosphere over time, which can cause the apparent positions of objects to change. Camera stabilization may be provided, for example, by mounting the camera to a stationary platform (e.g., a tripod) or by specialized image capture hardware. Devices employing the latter are generally referred to as having Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). Ideally, camera stabilization compensates for all camera motion to produce an image in which the scene's static background is sharp even when captured with a long exposure time.
Even when 100% accurate, camera stabilization does not detect or compensate for scene object motion. In particular, during long exposure times objects in a scene can move significantly making the final image look unnatural (i.e., sharp background with blur trails due to moving objects). Even if the moving objects are not moving significantly (e.g., faces in a portrait scene), their motion may still result in a visible blur when the exposure time is longer than, for example, ½ second or ¼ second.